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The Obama administration has chosen to keep the status quo<\/em> on Plan B, overruling the FDA’s science-based decision<\/a>. This means that girls 16 and younger will continue to need a prescription from a doctor to buy Plan B, while girls and women 17 and older will continue only having access to Plan B through a pharmacist.<\/p>\n Since there’s a 72 hour window for using Plan B, very few kids or even teens will have the wherewithal to arrange for a doctor’s appointment, get a script for Plan B, and order it from a pharmacy in three days time (and if the only pharmacist in town is an evangelical, then forget about it!). The majority of Plan B’s users are adult women — and the pharmacy-only rule can easily be a significant barrier. I take prescription medication, and it has happened that it’s taken days for my work schedule, my pharmacy’s open hours, and the bus schedule to align. It’s very easy for mandatory work and commute hours, and a pharmacy’s open hours, to fully overlap for a couple of days in a row — and when that happens, you can’t get to that pharmacy. ((In my experience, this is especially likely to happen on weekends, when many pharmacies keep shorter hours. Good thing no one ever has sex on a Friday night!))<\/p>\n As I understand it, Plan B is more likely to be effective taken in the first 24 hours than (say) at hour 70. So even a day’s delay can be significant.<\/p>\n Supporting the decision to block Plan B, Obama claimed ((I suspect President Obama was more worried about seeing attack ads on TV accusing President Obama of enabling 10-year-old girls to have secret sex behind their parent’s back.)) to be worried about 10 and 11 year olds buying their Plan B “alongside bubble gum or batteries.”<\/p>\n Scott Lemieux wrote<\/a>:<\/p>\n …according to the most recent data<\/a> I could find, of the roughly 758,000 teen pregnancies a year 212 of these involved girls 12 and younger. If you\u2019re getting into a debate about Plan B and 12-year-olds you\u2019re being played for a sucker<\/em>. The relevant Plan B debate is about 15- and 16-year olds, and people who are bringing up the 0% of teenage pregnancies among 11-year-olds are trying to make paternalistic regulations seem more reasonable. (Which, of course, should not imply that making it more difficult for the infinitesimal number of 12-year-olds who get pregnant to get emergency contraception is anything but a terrible idea.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The Guttmocher Institute writes<\/a>:<\/p>\n Sebelius\u2019 focus on 11-year-olds is specious. Fewer than 1% of 11-year-old girls are sexually active, but almost half of girls have had sex by their 17th birthdays, and most of these begin at age 15 or 16. Recent government data from the National Survey of Family Growth suggest that the age restriction on emergency contraception has limited use of the method among this demographic, even as use increased substantially among older teens and young adults. Continuing to restrict access will only increase the number of teens faced with an unintended pregnancy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Even if we suppose that only 1 in 10,000 adult women who would use Plan B would have trouble getting Plan B in time due to having to get it from a Pharmacist, that’s still an enormous group compared to the incredibly tiny number of 10 and 11 year old girls Obama claims to be concerned about.<\/p>\n Regarding Obama’s “adverse effect” line, Aaron Carroll points out<\/a> that there are lots of far more dangerous, far cheaper drugs that kids can buy over the counter, which have an adverse effect:<\/p>\n Just looking at kids 5 years of age and under, there were more than 130,000 calls [to poison control centers] for analgesics, 53,000 for vitamins, 48,000 for antihistamines, and 45,000 for cough and cold preparations. And yet, no one seems to be too concerned that these medications could be purchased \u201calongside bubble gum and batteries\u201d. And, for the record, battery ingestions killed 4 kids in that age group that year.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Even if every single pregnant 10-12 year old takes Plan B and suffers an “adverse effect” — and there’s no evidence at all for that — shouldn’t the hundreds of thousands of children who suffer adverse effects from other OTC medicines be a more urgent priority? Why isn’t the Obama administration calling for Tylenol, which is far more deadly, to be sold to kids only with a prescription?<\/p>\n Well, we all know why. It’s about sex, and more honest defenders of the status quo than Obama admit this. In comments, Robert wrote<\/a>:<\/p>\n Tylenol doesn\u2019t enable the concealment of behaviors that reasonable parents really ought to know about their children\u2019s participation in.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t want my 14 year old stepdaughter to have sex at this point in her life. If she does have sex, I want her to use contraception and disease prevention, and I hope that she would come to her mother or I about the entire question. But she might not, and I understand that.<\/p>\n But understanding it, I do not want society to collude in her ability to conceal the behavior from her mother or myself. OTC Plan B permits her to engage in risky, unprotected, barrier-free sexual intercourse, and conceal the behavior from people who do have a legitimate parental role in her life and really ought to know about it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n There’s an odd and unjustified line Robert draws here. Why is it that it’s okay for a 14 year old girl to have protected, barriered sex secretly, but when it’s unbarriered sex suddenly things change? It’s true that a 14 year old using a condom is being marginally more responsible, but just because she’s using a condom doesn’t mean that she’s using it correctly (I’d suspect the average 14 year old is less likely to use a condom correctly than an average adult), or that the sexual intercourse is not still “risky.” There are many extremely substantial risks other than pregnancy, after all. What about a 14 year old who has been seduced by a 30 year old — don’t parents need to know about that, even if condoms are used?<\/p>\n So why is it okay that condom use by 14 year olds is “conceal[ed]… from people who do have a legitimate parental role in her life and really ought to know about it”? Don’t the parental rights of people whose 14 year olds use condoms count? By allowing condoms to be bought outside a pharmacy (and — gasp! — from vending machines), isn’t society colluding in the ability of 14 year olds to conceal their behavior from their parents?<\/p>\n But no one would go for treating condoms like Plan B. No politician would dare <\/em>propose that adult men should only be able to buy condoms from a Pharmacist, in order to protect 200 kids from the horrors of condom use. Because even if, for the sake of argument, we say that it would be better if 14-year-olds didn’t have access to condoms, our society would never sacrifice the needs of adult men to have convenient access to contraceptives. We’d recognize — correctly — that our society includes both <\/em>children and adults, and we should be extremely hesitant to take rights away from grown-ups.<\/p>\n It’s not enough to say that we should restrict kid’s access to Plan B (or condoms) in order to, in some Bizarro universe, make kids more likely to talk to their parents about their sex lives. Because those kids and their parents aren’t the only ones effected. We need to ask, instead, is it worth inconveniencing hundreds of thousands of grown-ups who need to use Plan B, in exchange for making it marginally more likely that Robert’s 14 year old stepdaughter will talk to her parents?<\/p>\n With condoms, we don’t think it’s worth it. With Plan B, we do.<\/p>\n So why the double-standard? I think there are two things going on here. First of all, our society just doesn’t value ladies’ rights to take care of lady parts as much as we value dude’s rights to take care of dude parts. And second of all, Plan B is relatively new technology, and new means scary and frightening, and people just generally lose their shit and stop thinking logically when there’s scary new technology being discussed. (When I was a kid, there was a lot of concern over the new trend of separate phone lines for kids — wouldn’t that make children more accessible to sexual predators?)<\/p>\n The case for helping minors by restricting Plan B is extremely speculative, to say the least, and the likely number of minors helped would be tiny; that’s not something we should sacrifice the rights of hundreds of thousands of adult women for, any more than we’d sacrifice men’s rights were the position reversed. <\/p>\n As for Plan B and minors, my views are admittedly extreme. I think we should provide it, free, in schools, to any girl under age 18 who requests it, to have it preemptively. So that way, instead of having to go to a store if she has sex without protection, she already has it available in her sock drawer. A study in JAMA<\/a> found that giving girls Plan B in advance did not increase the odds of them having unprotected sex, but almost doubled the odds of them using Plan B after unprotected sex. Reducing the rates of unwanted teen pregnancy is something that we can and should do. I can’t help but notice that most (although not all) of the support for the Plan B status quo is coming from folks who are “pro-life”; you’d think pro-lifers would be the very first to prioritize preventing unwanted pregnancy over other issues.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Obama administration has chosen to keep the status quo on Plan B, overruling the FDA’s science-based decision. This means that girls 16 and younger will continue to need a prescription from a doctor to buy Plan B, while girls … Continue reading